Has anyone had inappropriate images show up in Flickr?

A teacher went into a page to start editing in Canvas. She selected the 'insert image' icon which took her to the usual options of Canvas or Flicker to select an image from. She chose Flickr.

She typed in 'welcome' and a selection of photos popped up. One was of a very naked man. They saw the funny side but were also greatly concerned, and rightly so, that staff and students could be exposed to such images.

To follow up I talked to one of our tech experts. We tried to replicate the 'event' but the image had disappeared. Flickr had obviously got wind of it and taken it down?

Hi Bobby. I use Flickr quite a bit and have run into images from time to time that I wondered how they could be related to my search term. Flickr is a great resource but it seems like you never know exactly what you will get when you type a word into a search field.

Interestingly, this issue has come up before (see remove flickr). Roxanne Conroy had some good thoughts on the issue, but I get the impression that Canvas is just allowing a general search of Flickr resources.

I also found from Flickr itself information suggesting that it depends on users to correctly categorize their uploads, so anyone can probably put any tags on their photos, unless their image is reported.

I didn't see an idea created related to a filtering option in Canvas, although if individuals are not tagging their images in a helpful way I'm not sure that a filter would help as much as we would like.

I use Flickr a lot. This kind of thing happens rarely, but it can happen.

My guess is that the best thing to do is to not try to police the Internet (an attempt which demands massive resources and doesn't even work when you do devote massive resources to it), you have to instead educate students about what the Internet is. It's a public space, which means it is not under anybody's complete control. In the same way that students have to understand what to do if they encounter something inappropriate or dangerous out in the world, they have to know what to do if they encounter something inappropriate online.

They are probably using cellphones and computers outside of school which are not going to have filters and protections, so instead of focusing efforts on filtering and protecting at school, I think it's better to focus the effort on making sure students CAN control their Internet experience. That way, they are ready to use the Internet outside of school.

Which, very likely, they are going to do, right? So, get them ready to be proactive and aware about that.

I would assess which of the two is the bigger problem / bigger opportunity:

#1. The literally one in a million naked man picture at Flickr

#2. Students' need to learn more about how to use the Flickr for their own purposes

Given a problem to tackle, I far prefer problem #2.

Give me an hour with a roomful of children, and I could teach them AMAZING things they can do with Flickr.

Put tools in children's hands and help them learn how to use those tools; that is my personal preference.

And there is so much they need to learn and that we can and should teach them!

And I'd probably start by making sure all the teachers were experts in their use of Flickr.

Bobby Pedersen I'm sure one of the Canvas Engineers could explain how they set up the integration with the Flickr API and the choices they made, etc. etc. but I haven't seen it documented publicly anywhere (but I also haven't looked; it might be here somewhere)

That is so great that you gave them that feedback Bobby Pedersen ... I've seen Flickr integrations at other education projects, so I bet there is some work they can do to clean that up for you if they can see the specific examples of what their API configuration was letting through. Super!

Thanks everyone for brining this issue to our attention and for all your input. We've applied a fix that should resolve the problem. If you continue to see inappropriate images coming from Flickr be sure to let us know!

I would like to apply for the position of "Adjunct Instructor in the Inappropriate Images Department" at your institution. Granted, I have little direct experience with teaching intentionally inappropriate images, but I have taught many sections of Algebra 2 in which the students felt it was inappropriate that they had to learn Sigma notation (and, in some cases, where they felt it was inappropriate that they needed to create their own graphs as images), and I feel that I can grow from those experiences to successfully learn the skills needed to be successful in that position.

On a more serious note, ideally whatever safe search option has been turned on would be one of those things with different settings for different institutions/courses. I could definitely see someone teaching an anatomy class wanting their image search filtered differently than someone teaching 5th grade.

I haven't run into inappropriate images, but I did recently encounter inappropriate Alt Text on an image while conducting a training class! It was certainly a teachable moment in that it drove home the need to HAVE alt text and how important it is to check the default alt text that comes with the image!